The government has found £440m available from efficiency savings and returned subsidies. According to a statement from The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) the money will help homes and businesses in the "hardest-to-reach" parts of the UK to get decent minimum broadband speeds. Karen Bradley, the culture secretary, said that the funds would be sufficient to "benefit around 600,000 extra premises," and provide access to superfast broadband of up to 24Mbps.

That target level of broadband speeds is expected to be enough for a typical family to watch TV on multiple devices at the same time and/or let children do their homework online, while other family members indulge in inline shopping and banking. These services are "at the heart of modern life," said the government.

Bradley added that broadband speed uplifts are also reliant upon the people signing up to the fastest services. "Increasing take-up is a win-win-win: consumers get a better service, it encourages providers to invest, and when more people sign up in BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK programme) areas, money is clawed back to pay for more connections," explained the culture secretary.

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Good luck getting OpenReach to pull their fingers out of their arses. I recently moved to east Devon. I am just 1/2 mile from a town (Honiton) and I was told I would get between 20 and 30mbps on a fibre connection (although I'm damned if I can find the email or whatever that said that now). I get about 12 if I reboot my router and over the course of a week it degrades to 6. For this I pay 50 quid a month (including call packages and line rental). I am about to open a case with the provider (Sky) but I can guarantee that it will be the <admin removed> ancient copper that runs from the street cabinet to the house. The cabinet isn't even in the village - it's in an industrial estate somewhere over the A30. But OpenReach will swear it's not their problem and drag their heels. Eventually they'll send out a goon who will do nothing at all and claim everything is fine and this back and forth will go on and on and on until eventually one of them lifts their finger and realises the line is <broken>and then it might get scheduled for replacement or fixing, but no doubt they'll try and foist the cost on me.

The government has not gone far enough with OpenReach - it shouldn't just be separated from BT it should be taken in hand and re-nationalised and made entirely accountable to the country via parliament and not be run for profits. It is a crucial bit of infrastructure and the industry has proven it can't be trusted to run it properly. We need more new street cabinets with fibre running to them at a minimum and smaller villages and rural areas should not be fobbed off with one cabinet that serves a massive area with overly long copper lines. A side benefit would be fewer unsightly poles and telegraph lines since the capacity of fibre is so much greater too.